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I don't think all artists are mad, but there is statistical medical evidence that a lot of creative people suffer from various mood disorders. They f… - Elizabeth Hand
" "I don't think all artists are mad, but there is statistical medical evidence that a lot of creative people suffer from various mood disorders. They fall somewhere on the spectrum of being bipolar, of being borderline autistic and so on. These things are there. Now of course these days you can go to college and when you come out you are a professional artist and you can run a gallery as a business and have a career. That is a very valid way for an artist to make a living. But it doesn't make for a very interesting story. It doesn't have a lot of mythic subtext. … For me a lot of the world really is like that. The scenes in my book that people describe as "such a hallucinatory sequence" … I don't see the world like that all the time, but I see the world like that a lot. So what am I going to do about that? Am I going to go crazy? Am I going to institutionalize myself? Am I going to go and work in a cubicle as a telemarketer so that I don't give vent to that? Or am I going to take that and channel it into my work? It is a gift.
English
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About Elizabeth Hand
Elizabeth Hand (born 29 March 1957) is an American writer, whose first story, "Prince of Flowers", was published in 1988 in Twilight Zone magazine, and her first novel, Winterlong, was published in 1990.
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Additional quotes by Elizabeth Hand
I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t blink. Couldn’t hear a thing, not them talking or the wind or the truck driving off or bees. Couldn’t scream out to Will to help me or to anyone else, all of them talking and going on as though I wasn’t even there.
And that was when I realized: This is what it’s like to be dead. No clouds or lights or bright tunnel, not even darkness: just the world turning and going on without you and you’ll never be part of it again.
I find that many modern fantasies explain things away far too easily, which makes a lot of it overly familiar (to me, anyway). Real myths are often strange and startlingly unfamiliar, and don't always give up their meanings easily; you have to tease them out, and for me, that's one of the pleasures of reading older collections of lore.
I have to say (regretfully) that I've seen very little in my real life to indicate the presence of either the supernatural or the divine. As for apocalypse, I was imprinted at an early age with the idea of The End of the World (this also courtesy of the Catholic Church). I can remember being terrified of thunderstorms — I'd think, Uh oh, THIS IS IT. I was born in 1957, and grew up in the metropolitan New York area with the Cold War as a backdrop. In kindergarten and first and second grade we had constant air raid drills, sirens going off and that whole "Duck 'n Cover" drill when you cower under your desk or else hide in the classroom cloak closet, waiting for the Atomic Bomb to drop. I had nightmares about that well into my twenties. For a while in the 1970s I lived near a fire station in D.C., and when the fire sirens would go off at night I'd wake up terrified — again — that THIS WAS IT. Of course it never was, but it was good practice at being scared and thinking about scary stuff.
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